Sicily and Magna Graecia (South Italy)

The Alexandra is full of allusions to and whole sections about south Italy and to a lesser extent Sicily. This makes it likely that the poet came from southern Italy. Eastern Sicily hardly features, despite the ancient glories of its Greek cities. But western Sicily was important in Lykophron’s time for kinship reasons to do with the supposed Trojan origins of Elymian cities like Egesta and Eryx, whose support Rome needed in the mid-third-century BC: Troy was the mythical mother-city of Rome. In Italy, many places prominent in the poem (especially Croton and its neighbours) also featured in the ancient histories of the war against Hannibal, a recent event in 190 BC, and of Roman colonization policies of the 190s.